Search This Blog

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Abortion, Media, and the Gosnell Trial

West Philadelphia doctor Kermit Gosnell is on trial for running an abortion clinic in which he allegedly killed babies that had survived illegal, late-term abortions, and where a woman allegedly died of a botched pain-killer injection.
"The evidence is certainly compelling," said The Philadelphia Inquirer's Joseph Slobodzian. Slobodzian has been in the courtroom every day of the trial.
"There are any number of witnesses, most of them former employees of Dr. Gosnell's clinic, who say they saw late-term abortions being done, they saw fetuses, babies, that were moving, breathing after the procedure, and those babies were killed," said Slobodzian.


At USA Today, Kirsten Powers notes that the CNN coverage is the exception:
A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state.
The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial's first day. They've been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony.